Have Coffee With Your Sidewalk Art

September 15, 2011

Whoever created this art technique must have been drinking a lot of coffee when he or she saw a pattern in cups sitting on the table.

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Flew into Paris yesterday. Today and tomorrow we’ll work on getting over jet lag as we take a hop-on-hop-off bus around the city. Looking forward to sitting outdoors at those quintessential little outdoor tables.  On Friday we’ll start an eight-day river cruise on the Seine.

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An easy way to create posts while I’m gone is to use videos and photos I have found pleasing, inspiring or funny. Let’s call them “Video and Photo Take-a-Breaks.” Enjoy them while I am enjoying my vacation.

I would never have thought to create this Mona Lisa on a sidewalk in Sydney — or figured out how to do it.

3,604 cups of coffee were each filled with different amounts of milk to create the different tones and shades!

You can see other pictures of this original artistic style at:

Quick French Lessons, Anyone?

September 12, 2011

How could you take a trip to France if you didn’t know the language?

I wish my parents had taught me another language when I was young. Then today I might be able to speak foreign words, even if I didn’t speak them fluently. However, my ears seem deaf to the pronunciation of non-English words.

What will I do when we take a boat ride down the Seine later this week? I feel particularly anxious because I have always been puzzled by French. Every word seems to have letters they don’t pronounce!

Consequently, I’ve never felt comfortable ordering a French dish off the menu, afraid I will sound terribly uncultured (aren’t cultured people always supposed to speak French?).

Living in Southern California we often eat at Mexican restaurants and though I don’t speak Spanish, at least in that language words are almost always pronounced the way they’re spelled. That is not true for French, as far as I can tell (though a man I know who speaks several languages says English is the worst in that regard).

Anyway, if I feel unprepared to order French dishes here in the United States, what will happen when I get to Paris and am faced with a menu that will expose my linguistic limitations?

That’s why I’ve decided to aim for a middle ground. Every day I am practicing some words from Rick Steve’s French, Italian and German Phrase Book, focusing on basic words for meeting and greeting and ordering food. Now I feel at least a bit less anxious and have a place I can look up words with easy pronunciation guides.

I am starting with phrases like C’il vous plait (pronounced see voo play), meaning “please”. Without the help of the phrase book, I would have pronounced that as “see-ill vous plate.”

I have also memorized Parlez-vous anglais (pronounced par-lay-voo ahn-glay). Now I can ask, “Do you speak English, please?” Imagine I shall use it frequently!

Preparing for a More Relaxed Trip

September 8, 2011

When you are getting ready to leave home for a business or pleasure trip, how do you choose what you need to do and what can be left undone?

I have had a conundrum this week as I prepare for two weeks in Europe (yes, I know, it’s terribly painful, but someone has to do it to keep the travel industry alive).

In the past, wanting to make the maximum use of any time I had before  leaving, I would put pressure on myself to have “evergreen” posts completed before I left. You can see the last post, Viewing Time as an Ocean, for an explanation of the term. Writing at least three posts a week seemed necessary.

Now, as I said in that post,  I am trying to stop viewing time like a bullet train I have to catch. Yet whether seen through flowing water in an ocean or the window of a train, there is limited time to complete tasks I want done. And it has struck me that there is one thing I’ve been forgetting: setting aside time to learn more about my video camera so I can take the kinds of pictures I can turn into several videos for my websites.

Something has to go and I’ve decided it will be writing enough evergreen posts for three a week. Instead, I can manage two a week (Mondays and Thursdays) of  various videos or photos I’ve enjoyed finding on the Internet recently, and a couple unpublished articles I’ve had around for awhile.

So during September come here and be inspired and/or entertained. As the theme for this blog says, enrich your life, enrich your relationships. I think these will do that for you.

Viewing Time as an Ocean

September 5, 2011

Wouldn’t floating in the ocean feel more relaxing than rushing to catch a train?

This year has been filled with more trips than I usually take (five so far) and with each one I try to follow the standard I set back on March 14 in Maintaining Sanity While Preparing for a Trip. Haven’t always done that as well as I would like, but that’s definitely my plan this week as I get ready for two weeks in Europe starting next Wednesday.

As I approach my list of  “wouldn’t it be nice if I could also ______ before I leave, ” I am thinking of a recent blog by David Spero called The Ocean of Time. In it he considers the very nature of time itself as a way to counter our tendency to squeeze more plans into less time than we have to do them.

First, he reminds us that we usually think of time as a “rushing river, or a speeding train,” perhaps the “bullet train that we have to chase and catch or risk being left behind, or run over.  Then the next day we will have to chase the train down and catch it again.”

He then reminds us that a farmer watches the seasons go by and recognizes that as the seasons change, he will have a change to do something next year. Finally, David suggests that we might change our idea of time if we “imagine time as a lake, or a still sea:

“And you can float on it, you can splash around in it…  You have centuries of time to the right of you, and centuries of time on your left.  And ages of time behind you, that got you to where you are, and ages of time in front of you.

“You still have things to do.  But now you have all the time you could ever want, or ever need, or ever use.  An ocean of time, spreading out in all directions to eternity.  No way to be left behind, no way to be left out, no time limits to expire…it goes on forever.”

Of course, he points out, “if you spend your whole life in the ocean of time, you will miss some appointments.  But if you spend your whole life on the bullet train of time, you get to the end far too fast, and you will miss most of the scenery along the way.”

I am trying to follow his advice and first do what must be done (like packing, which I will begin today). Then whatever time is left may or may not include writing “evergreen” posts for while I am gone.

Incidentally, I learned the term evergreen this week in a column by Meghan Daum of the Los Angeles Times. She said that “evergreen is journalist lingo for a topic that, like its namesake, is always in season (or, at least, one that won’t go stale immediately).”

Would like to find time to do a number of posts so you have material to read on the blog, but if I don’t, I hope you enjoy what you find here. And if this is my only post for September, just remember that I am floating in the ocean of time and enjoying myself immensely.

An Invention You Cannot Do Without

August 29, 2011

What invention are you especially glad has been invented because it makes your life immeasurably better?

The great thing about writing a blog (or anything on the Internet for that matter) is that if you make a mistake you can remove a page and start over again, inserting the correct fact or statement for something you hadn’t intended to say.

That’s what I’m doing today. When I opened the blog this morning, I noticed I had made a mistake that could be made by almost anyone. Anyone, that is, expect those who have not used the Internet for very long — or who are extremely cautious and/or extremely lucky. (The same thing can happen to users of word processing when you try to reuse an old document.)

What happened here is that I had tried to take advantage of the wording I used earlier for the series of “Questions Worth Asking Yourself.” I simply copied the format I was planning to use — without first removing the old questions and inserting new ones. Consequently, the questions made no sense in relationship to the title.

They were perfectly good questions, but they didn’t match the subject of “An Invention You Cannot Do Without.”

Now I’ll try again.

Questions Worth Asking Yourself: #4

In a post on July 15 called The World’s Greatest Challenge, I began a series of questions I call Questions Worth Asking Yourself. Here is the fourth in that category:

What one piece of technology that has been created in the last one-hundred years would you not want to do without?

Why?

WIN A PRINT BOOK: Anyone who sends me a comment about any of the questions will be entered into a drawing for a print copy of Ask Yourself Questions and Change Your Life: Stop Wishing Your Life Were Different and Make It Happen. That’s right, you’ll actually get a print copy, not an ebook (unless you would prefer that). So it may be worth your effort to consider these questions carefully and share your answer.